I'm at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

I'm going to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts!

Greetings from the Taubman Museum of Art in downtown Roanoke

I'll be heading for the VCCA in a couple of days. Meanwhile I'm visiting fabulous old friends and getting shown the sites in Salem and Roanoke. 

The Taubman Museum is a gorgeous place, designed by Randall Stout, who worked for Frank Gehry.

The VCCA is its own kind of gorgeous. I think at least half of my published stories were drafted there during prior residencies.  http://deniseemanuelclemen.com 
I'm thrilled to be going back.

Drinking with the Saints

We put my mother's ashes in the ground in my hometown in Iowa today. There's something indelibly shocking about seeing both of your parents' names on tombstones.

My brother suggested I read something so I revised a past post that was the product of many dinner conversations with my mom during the years that she lived with me.

My mother’s education only went as far as the 8th grade, and then she went to work. But even before that first paycheck, she remembered get paid a nickel to pick the bugs off the neighbor’s potatoes. She began her first full-time job at the age of fourteen, living with a doctor, his wife, and their newborn. Never leave the mother alone with the baby, she was cautioned. In the middle of one night, my mother awoke to a commotion, and was told that the mother had tried to kill the baby even though the husband had been right there with her. In the morning, the wife was packed off to an asylum, the baby went to live with relatives, and my mother found herself out of a job. 

After that she and her twin sister Millie worked in the cafeteria at Loras College. She remembered how she put the cherry just so in the center of the grapefruit halves for the priests.

Then they were waitresses in Dubuque, Iowa at Diamond’s Bar and Grill and at the Triangle Café. There were no tips in those days. Except from one guy who always tipped a quarter. The waitresses would trip over each other trying to get to him.

There was a stint at Betty Jane Candies, hand-dipping chocolates. Eat as much as you want, she said her boss told her. The eating with abandon only lasted a day or two.

And she sold cigarettes and smoking paraphernalia at Stampfers, a fancy department store in downtown Dubuque.

Then she worked in a club across the river in East Dubuque as a dice girl in the game "twenty-six." Millie spun the roulette wheel. One night their parents walked in, surprised to see their daughters there. My mom told me she and her sister were just as surprised to see their parents.

Millie went out to Baltimore first. They had a girlfriend who could help them get good paying jobs at Glenn L. Martin, a company going full throttle in the manufacture of aircraft for World War II. Mom borrowed money from a friend to send Millie out first in the spring of ’43 and then they both worked to save money, and my mom joined her sister in the fall. Millie was a riveter, and my mom worked for Glenn L. Martin as a file clerk.

Then came the jobs that I envy. If I could go back in time and be my mother for a couple of months, I'd be a hatcheck girl at the Chanticleer, the Band Box, or the Club Charles. I'd live in Baltimore and hear every fabulous band and collect all the autographed headshots of the stars. I'd be the photo girl snapping souvenir pictures, remembering to ask first if the gentleman and his date would like a photo--because you never know, the gorgeous gal on his arm might not be his wife. 

A couple of things happened next. I'm not sure in what order. My mother had a boyfriend, a grocer, who was shot and killed one night when he went back to check on his store. And her sister got married to a guy who didn't especially like her. She went back home.

After my mother returned to Iowa, she worked as a hostess at a bar called The Circle where the bartender introduced her to a snazzy older man with blue eyes so beautiful, you could dive in and never want to come back up. They eloped. 

My father didn't want my mom to work--though she worked in his grocery store for a couple of years until he sold it. But there was a home cooked supper every night, baking to satisfy my father's insatiable sweet tooth, making delicious jams and jellies, canning, filling our back porch with crocks of pickles, and sewing our clothes.

After my father died and she was swindled out of his life insurance, she went back to work. She was 51 years old, had an 8th-grade education, and had been out of the workforce for almost 20 years. She made parts for machinery. She made plastic buckets, getting paid minimum wage. She worked at a factory that had something to do with fabric, and one year there was a small fire and she came home with bolts of salvaged flannel. Nightgowns for everyone! Her big break came after she heard about a union job at the John Deere plant. She drove a fork truck there and worked on the assembly line doing whatever job they asked her to for more than 9 years--until she was laid off just a month or so before she would have qualified for a pension.

Then she took care of an old woman, keeping her company and preparing her food. She worked in a bakery in a town so far away that her wages barely kept pace with the cost of her gas. There was another minimum wage factory job or two. 

When Millie’s husband died, my mother moved back to Baltimore where she worked for the City of Baltimore as a custodian cleaning office buildings.

Now she’s rolling the dice for the angels and making martinis for the saints.

It's a long and winding road. And we are all on the same path.

Saturday Morning Beach Report: Feeding Frenzy

And I felt a little frenzied last night, trying to get into a bottle of wine after  the cork broke.

What the Yoga Teacher Said

A positively beautiful sunset from a couple of nights ago

I have four different yoga teachers. They say many fine and memorable things.

Thursday's teacher always ends her class with a quote.

I've been working on forming new positive habits, so I appreciated today's quote very much.

Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

You might as well let go and enjoy the ride.

My younger brothers and me

In this picture I'm not the one looking resigned to being hurled down the slide, but I felt like I was at the top of a steep and rather slippery slope when this:

arrived in the mail a couple of days ago. In a couple of months I can put it to use. Hope I get a chance to wear it out. And I hope we have Medicare for all before I leave this planet. The ups and downs of my health insurance post-divorce were just plain stupid. Why do we still have our health insurance tied to our jobs? 

In other news it rained here again last night. And it's still humid. I've used my air conditioner three times in three days--before then it didn't get used at all. It was just a place to set stuff. 

Notes from the Apocalypse

Blue heron on a neighbor's chimney

Parts of Houston are still underwater. Many Texas towns have been washed away entirely. California is on fire. The rest of the West is pocked with similar wildfires. A 2700 year old grove of Sequoias near Yosemite is burning. One of the longest-lived organisms on this Earth, the Sequoia has seen centuries of man's folly. The freeway in my old neighborhood is closed due to L.A.'s largest-ever wildfire. A dozen cites in California recorded their highest-ever temperatures yesterday. Today's temperatures may beat that.

It was 86 here in paradise on Friday. Yesterday's high was a little higher. The temperatures aren't dropping much at night. I turned on my air conditioner before going to sleep last night since it was in the high 80s upstairs. Right now, it's already 92 outside. Probably a record. When my mom first arrived here in August of 2012, one of my first tasks was to buy her some long underwear. The fresh breeze from the ocean blew right through her. It was perfectly still here this morning.

And I'm wondering about how my front closet would fare as a fallout shelter. Sometimes the skies around here rumble and roar with military activity. At night it makes me uneasy. There's something going on, but I don't know what it is and probably don't want to know, really.

But the un-knowing of what we know doesn't serve us. I want to hold fast to what I know and let it propel me toward change or insight or something.

I hope you are well, dear everyone. Stay safe. Don't breathe the smoke. But breathe.

Saturday Morning Beach Report: Teach a Man to Fish....

It was immediately obvious that something was going on at the beach this morning. It turned out to be a fishing tournament. I kinda counted heads--and I'd say about 80 people (mostly men, but not all) were there. It was fun to notice what people were wearing. Lots of shorts and bare feet. There was also a guy in hip boots, and two guys who appeared to be friends wearing black shoes and black socks, but wet up to mid-calf anyway. The couple wearing matching American flag shorts got some compliments from their fellow fishermen.

I turned my attention to the dunes for awhile. I don't think I give them enough attention. They are beautiful in their own right.

Friday Morning Beach Report: Heron Stalks Fisherman and other news

Here's what the beach looked like when I arrived this morning.

And as if that wasn't enough, there were some dramatic bird goings-on.

There was a great blue heron stalking a fisherman. I've never seen a blue heron on the sand, but since this one could fly, walk, and tiptoe like a thief perfectly well, I guess it was okay. Mostly the herons hang out on the rooftops  and boat docks of the houses in the marina.

I take all my photos with my iPhone and that's painfully obvious here. But this gathering of little white birds (I couldn't quite tell if they were snowy plovers or sanderlings) is only partially captured in the photo. They were just sitting there. Hundreds of them.

And there was beach glass. Nice big chunks of it.